Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits, in Towards Historic Judaism, says you can teach all of world history simply by teaching a lesson in Jewish history followed by a lesson in the parallel non-Jewish history of the same time and place.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when I read a history of Cochini Jewry. That history was essentially a synopsis of the entire history of colonialism in the Indian Ocean under the succession of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. In brief, the Portuguese tried to convert or kill the Cochini Jews, the Dutch just bought and sold and used locals as their intermediaries, and the British just destroyed all sociopolitical infrastructure (including the caste system as it pertained to the Cochini Jews) and remade it to their advantage. Just flesh that out to twenty pages, and you’ve got something. The article was about Jews, but you learned so much more in the process.